Automatic Programming: Large Language Models and Beyond

Automatic programming has seen increasing popularity due to the emergence of tools like GitHub Copilot which rely on Large Language Models (LLMs). At the same time, automatically generated code faces challenges during deployment due to concerns around quality and trust. In this article, we study automated coding in a general sense and study the concerns around code quality, security and related issues of programmer responsibility. These are key issues for organizations while deciding on the usage of automatically generated code. We discuss how advances in software engineering such as program repair and analysis can enable automatic programming. We conclude with a forward looking view, focusing on the programming environment of the near future, where programmers may need to switch to different roles to fully utilize the power of automatic programming. Automated repair of automatically generated programs from LLMs, can help produce higher assurance code from LLMs, along with evidence of assurance

AutoCodeRover: Autonomous Program Improvement

Researchers have made significant progress in automating the software development process in the past decades. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted the development process, where developers can use LLM-based programming assistants to achieve automated coding. Nevertheless software engineering involves the process of program improvement apart from coding, specifically to enable software maintenance (e.g. bug fixing) and software evolution (e.g. feature additions). In this paper, we propose an automated approach for solving GitHub issues to autonomously achieve program improvement. In our approach called AutoCodeRover, LLMs are combined with sophisticated code search capabilities, ultimately leading to a program modification or patch. In contrast to recent LLM agent approaches from AI researchers and practitioners, our outlook is more software engineering oriented. We work on a program representation (abstract syntax tree) as opposed to viewing a software project as a mere collection of files. Our code search exploits the program structure in the form of classes/methods to enhance LLM's understanding of the issue's root cause, and effectively retrieve a context via iterative search. The use of spectrum based fault localization using tests, further sharpens the context, as long as a test-suite is available. Experiments on SWE-bench-lite which consists of 300 real-life GitHub issues show increased efficacy in solving GitHub issues (22-23% on SWE-bench-lite). On the full SWE-bench consisting of 2294 GitHub issues, AutoCodeRover solved around 16% of issues, which is higher than the efficacy of the recently reported AI software engineer Devin from Cognition Labs, while taking time comparable to Devin. We posit that our workflow enables autonomous software engineering, where, in future, auto-generated code from LLMs can be autonomously improved.

Fairness-guided SMT-based Rectification of Decision Trees and Random Forests

Data-driven decision making is gaining prominence with the popularity of various machine learning models. Unfortunately, real-life data used in machine learning training may capture human biases, and as a result the learned models may lead to unfair decision making. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem for decision trees and random forests. Our approach converts any decision tree or random forest into a fair one with respect to a specific data set, fairness criteria, and sensitive attributes. The \emph{FairRepair} tool, built based on our approach, is inspired by automated program repair techniques for traditional programs. It uses an SMT solver to decide which paths in the decision tree could have their outcomes flipped to improve the fairness of the model. Our experiments on the well-known adult dataset from UC Irvine demonstrate that FairRepair scales to realistic decision trees and random forests. Furthermore, FairRepair provides formal guarantees about soundness and completeness of finding a repair. Since our fairness-guided repair technique repairs decision trees and random forests obtained from a given (unfair) data-set, it can help to identify and rectify biases in decision-making in an organisation.

Synthesizing Tasks for Block-based Programming

Block-based visual programming environments play a critical role in introducing computing concepts to K-12 students. One of the key pedagogical challenges in these environments is in designing new practice tasks for a student that match a desired level of difficulty and exercise specific programming concepts. In this paper, we formalize the problem of synthesizing visual programming tasks. In particular, given a reference visual task $\rm T^{in}$ and its solution code $\rm C^{in}$, we propose a novel methodology to automatically generate a set $\{(\rm T^{out}, \rm C^{out})\}$ of new tasks along with solution codes such that tasks $\rm T^{in}$ and $\rm T^{out}$ are conceptually similar but visually dissimilar. Our methodology is based on the realization that the mapping from the space of visual tasks to their solution codes is highly discontinuous; hence, directly mutating reference task $\rm T^{in}$ to generate new tasks is futile. Our task synthesis algorithm operates by first mutating code $\rm C^{in}$ to obtain a set of codes $\{\rm C^{out}\}$. Then, the algorithm performs symbolic execution over a code $\rm C^{out}$ to obtain a visual task $\rm T^{out}$; this step uses the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) procedure to guide the search in the symbolic tree. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm through an extensive empirical evaluation and user study on reference tasks taken from the \emph{Hour of the Code: Classic Maze} challenge by \emph{Code.org} and the \emph{Intro to Programming with Karel} course by \emph{CodeHS.com}.